


buried close, like a ghost

by mag003 (MMagpieMcCorkle)



Series: the ghost who walks, she's on the prowl [1]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Original Character Death(s), Pre-Canon, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:55:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24003958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMagpieMcCorkle/pseuds/mag003
Summary: Naoko contemplates the armour.
Relationships: Naoko Katagawa & Original Character(s)
Series: the ghost who walks, she's on the prowl [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731622
Kudos: 4





	buried close, like a ghost

**Author's Note:**

> im planning ("planning") on making this a series bc i love naoko very much but god i cannot commit to chaptered things. why.

A cave system that serves well as a temporary hideout while she contemplates (dithers and hums and haws) over her next move. There's water that's clean enough, she supposes, and it can serve for a few days. In fact, she's been in this cave system before on one of her many... many adventures. _It's hard being Number Twelve, it's hard being the ghost. Fun to be the final blade, though._ Disturbing and exhilarating fact that she both shies away from and stares at directly, blank and cool.

At least, she _used_ to be that. Now a scared woman with a gun and no allies. No living allies close enough anyway. Her last is lying dead further down in the cave, a hole through her chest, through her heart.

(When she tells the Vault Hunters that she took the armour from an Atlas soldier, it just seems better for her to put as much distance as possible. "He" instead of "she", some stranger's face who she'd stumbled upon, not a friend she let die.)

(Hannah, in her dreams, just laughs about it. "Makes sense," she says with nothing but truth, "you're terrible with your emotions.")

Naoko slides down to the deeper part of the cave, shivering as the sun starts to dip, and stumbles when she touches ground again. She'd re-covered Hannah's face with her helmet, unable to keep from staring at her dead face. Open eyes. Open mouth. The now-dried trickles of blood from her mouth. As mesmerising as the first kill she ever did, but that had never left her the vortex of guilt; no innocent deaths, only the guilty. She couldn't stop staring, so she had to cover it up. So now Hannah looks like any other Atlas soldier, a collected body laid out all nice and neat.

But Naoko _knows_ , and the unburdening of seeing it pays back her guilt tenfold.

 _Maybe I just have a guilt complex._ Her friends would agree.

Lying next to Hannah's body, only seven hours dead, Naoko notices again how they're the same in height, and had noticed some long years ago their similar build, and she can only guess that Hannah's kept it up since joining Atlas' then-small army three years before. It's a thought. _Technically, it's also identity fraud. They're going to think you killed her._ She's thinking far ahead, too far ahead.

But there's no other bandits lurking just outside of the mouth of the cave. She'd killed them all, if not with the Soleki Protocol, then their own weapons, and if not with their own weapons, then her own hands. It was both cathartic and not.

 _How would you leave?_ Wait for a pick-up of some sort. She wishes she could ask Hannah.

Naoko contemplates the armour. The hole goes right through. Could she explain that? She contemplates it. Contemplates. Thinks. Acts.

When she's done, she shudders a breath into the helmet, feeling far too much to untangle it all into neat boxes she can assess and file away (she's never been able to do it very well), and turns to Hannah in only her civilian clothes. Almost asleep, if you didn't see her face or the gaping wound in her chest.

"I'll come back for you." Her voice is steady. Deadened. "I'll bury you properly."

(Eventually, she does. After explaining her lot, her burden she'd left behind. She'd thought it strange how no animals had touched the body.)

**Author's Note:**

> for personal reference, i always thought there was a significant time gap between the events of bl3 and the zanara incident (a year, ish) so uh naoko's been impersonating for A While. i'm probably wrong and it's actually much more recent but lololol <3


End file.
